Tools for Information Literacy

Presentational elements

Using markup to control display of objects on a page

You can control how structural layer objects are presented, either as individual objects, or as a single object with shared properties.

We may use The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan from Project Gutenberg, to try some presentational work.

Suggestion: Do not try to format your text before you type a document.

You will find it easier in the long run to simply type your content and then format it all at once after you have entered your text. We'll look at examples.

Styles are a form of CSS

Use the styles sidebar to see the styles in use in the document or all the ways you have to format text within this document. You can create new styles or modify existing styles. Once the style is applied, it will remain constant unless you modify it again

You can directly access styles from the home ribbon.

The key thing about Styles

They mark up your text so that you can use tools to find, manipulate, or operate with them.

They may make the object look different, or they may just make its properties behave differently. Your styles sidebar is the tool to use to change your style properties, just as you might have done when you modified a style in your CSS sheet.

Styles and their uses

The styles and formatting sidebar allows you to control and modify all the styles in your document

When you make changes in the sidebar, you can make changes to your Style Sheet that affect all instances of the style. You can thus make document level style modifications. However, you can also apply the style changes only to one instance of the style in the document, and thus make a line level style modification.

Text formatting - fonts

The choice of typefaces, or fonts, is up to the document creator, but there are some thoughts to consider.

According to Ellen Lupton's Type on screen : a guide for designers, developers, writers, and students,

Choosing typefaces can be a bewildering task. Understanding how the proportions of letters affect their visual impact and knowing how a type design fits into the broader history of typography can help. Many of the typefaces we use today are based on designs produced hundreds of years ago. Classical serif faces, introduced in the fifteenth century, imitated older media - handwriting and stone carving. In the nineteenth century, printers devised simpler, bolder sans serif forms to meet the needs of commercial advertising.

You may hear that serif fonts are more readable than sans serif fonts. That may not be a valid scientific assessment.

A recent book on fonts and typefaces suggests two reasonable perspectives:

Read the text and decide what tone needs to be achieved. (p.65)
The which-is-better argument continues chiefly because there have been no conclusive studies measuring which one we find more legible. For this reason, opinions continue to be based on subjective observation and, perhaps most often, personal taste. (p. 66)
There are no stone-set rules - just keep it logical. (p.196)

Other thoughts on choosing fonts

Color

Customize as needed.

Underline

select underline from the formatting panel, or via the CTRL+U keyboard shortcut, but note [the underlined words in this sentence are just underlined]

be cautious with underline, as most readers tend to see underlined text as a hyperlink [because that last underlined word is a hyperlink]

Effects

strikethrough is better handled with Track Changes tool (in MSWord).

Superscript and subscript are useful for math work.

Shadow, Outline, Emboss, and Engrave are not too useful in print, but very useful for web applications.

Hidden text is tricky as it can show it to you as you draft the document, but will not be printed or shown when the show/hide button on the task ribbon is not pressed.

Default

Can change the built-in standard. Be careful.

Character Spacing

Useful for making things fit in a defined or confined space.

Text Effects

Not too useful for print, but may have some utility if you are sharing electronic versions of documents.

Symbols (special font sets)

Useful for creating attentional focus or for adding non-English  Çhä®âctérß to your text. Try with dropped cap for dramatic paragraph openings. If you are going to use a lot of them, create your own keyboard shortcuts.

Drop Cap

A way to put some polish into your output.

Special formatting

Borders and Shading

Useful for highlighting selected parts of text or for special purposes such as funeral notices or condolence letters.

Columns

A way to format all at once. More useful for publishing than for normal documents.

Change case

Use the ? feature to understand your options.

Page numbering

If you use headers and footers,

you can do numbering as part of those sections.